EC2 wwas taken down by the storms running across the US. Parts of EC2 were anyway. And it took down Netflix and others. Hmmmm. We put our web and mail into EC2 specifically to avoid these sorts of problems. While we are working on getting our second line up on a different technology from our primary, we are leaving it in the cloud. As I’ve said many times …. There ain’t no such thing as a silver bullet or a free lunch.

So I am off on a vacation tomorrow. Normally for our summer forays, I grab Gardner Dozius compendium called The Years Best Science Fiction. I have from year 14 to the current (year 28). Its just not summer without it. Well, its not out yet. Will be out on 3-July. Oh well… Ok … I also grab everything by Charles Stross that I have not read from the preceding year. Hey, he’s got a new Laundry book coming out!

Long overdue. We’ve had a … challenging … year, starting some family health issues, and my working from home for the first 6 weeks of the year. Company had to make an adjustment after we realized that there was an poor matching of capabilities, motivation, and goals for a portion of our team. All this contributed to increasing my level of stress. So I am happy to report that we are hopping into a car (minivan really), and making the trek to Orlando, by way of Atlanta.

[Update] Not all of the issues were with the supplier. I started investigating and found out that we deserved some of the lumps. Me in particular for not paying more attention to the situation as it evolved. I made the assumption that someone else was covering it, and I didn’t need to. As I’ve discovered, this was a mistake on my part. The story is more annoying than I allude to here.

First impression: this is so wrong … so … very wrong … Second impression: well, mebbe not. [ ](http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Samsung-Galaxy-S-III-Review/?page=5) Seriously though, this is a natural evolution of a public “flash” cloud. This is 1/5 of a gigaflop, which as a grad student 22+ years ago, I would have sacrificed for. I don’t think it will be too long before we are seeing multi-GFLOP on our hips. In which case, apart from network latency and storage bandwidth and size … you’ve got a seething mobile computing platform out there with a huge aggregate capability.

Again, hat tip to Alastair who pointed me at this article. At the most basic level, there are real costs, and real consequences to not being able to act nimbly, and leverage the bandwidth you need to perform the operations you require to successfully perform your job functions. These consequences could have some significant implications for legal cases. Or for terror threats. What if you have a trove of data, that you have to act quickly upon?

Had a link sent in (hat tip to Alastair) with a story that perfectly illustrates the data bandwidth wall, our ability to act in a legal manner with respect to it. There are broader implications, and … to us … something of a surprising connection to the company. And a serious indictment of the current US government procurement process. This story has EPIC FAILURE (for the US government) written all over it, for multiple reasons.

We’ve made one in particular, that is causing me to (seriously) regret our choice. We use wiki software for our documentation and internal site(s). We had chosen dekiwiki as our platform, based upon our perceived need for ease of use, access control, and other issues. First Wiki went up fine. This was an internal wiki for knowledge capture. Second wiki came up fine, for documentation. I like living documentation we can annotate.

This article makes a case that it is. As with many articles about X dying, its worth asking if their argument makes sense. Basically the point they are making boils down to density, resiliency, and other aspects. Specifically they point out that the fundamental flash design is inherently flawed … it self destructs after a while … wears out. So their argument begins, the denser the bits per cell, the fewer write cycles before the cell is unusable.

Just spent 3+ hours dealing with Verizon over setting up a business account for the company, moving phones/mifi to this, and getting a new line. Discovering in the process that the company doesn’t quite grok business customers. Or its own products. Or what its sold. Sadly, Verizon’s network is the best. Sadly, they are … a royal pain … to deal with. Very long story, wish it weren’t as bad as it is here.